Geology and Revelation: or, the Ancient History of the Earth, considered in the geological facts and revealed religion.Molloy, Gerald
Religion
Geology and Revelation: or, the Ancient History of the Earth, considered in the geological facts and revealed religion.
Molloy, Gerald
Bible and geology; Bible and science
Once more, it is written that, on the Sixth Day, “God said: Let the
earth bring forth the living creature in its kind, cattle and creeping
things, and beasts of the earth, according to their kinds. And it was
so done. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds,
and cattle and every thing that creepeth on the earth after its kind.
And God saw that it was good.”[173] And again Geology seems to confirm
the truth of the Inspired narrative, and to fill up the details of the
picture. “The Tertiary period,” continues Hugh Miller, “had also its
prominent class of existences. Its flora seems to have been no more
conspicuous than that of the present time; its reptiles occupy a very
subordinate place; but its beasts of the field were by far the most
wonderfully developed, both in size and numbers, that ever appeared
upon the earth. Its mammoths and its mastodons, its rhinoceri and
its hippopotami, its enormous dimotherium and colossal megatherium,
greatly more than equalled in bulk the greatest mammals of the present
time, and vastly exceeded them in number. The remains of one of its
elephants (Elephas primigenius) are still so abundant amid the frozen
wastes of Siberia, that what have been not inappropriately termed
‘ivory quarries’ have been wrought among their bones for more than a
hundred years. Even in our own country, of which, as I have already
shown, this elephant was for long ages a native, so abundant are the
skeletons and tusks, that there is scarcely a local museum in the
kingdom that has not its specimens, dug out of the Pleistocene deposits
of the neighborhood. And with this ancient elephant there were meetly
associated in Britain, as on the northern continents generally all
around the globe, many other mammals of corresponding magnitude. ‘Grand
indeed,’ says an English naturalist, ‘was the fauna of the British
islands in those early days. Tigers as large again as the biggest
Asiatic species lurked in the ancient thickets; elephants nearly
twice the size of the largest individuals that now exist in Africa or
Ceylon roamed in herds: at least two species of the rhinoceros forced
their way through the primeval forests; and the lakes and rivers were
tenanted by hippopotami as bulky, and with as great tusks, as those
of Africa.’ The massive cave-bear and large cave-hyæna belong to the
same formidable group, with at least two species of great oxen, with a
horse of smaller size, and an elk that stood ten feet four inches in
height. Truly this Tertiary age--this third and last of the geologic
periods--was peculiarly the age of great ‘beasts of the earth after
their kind, and of cattle after their kind.’”[174]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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